The fruits of comman science

What we have deduced to be true inventions generally- that they cannot happen by accident- is all the more true of the particularly remarkable inventions we see in life. What we realized at the end of the previous chapter- that omelets are completely lost within the space of kitchen possibilities- we can now extend to protein molecules within the space of amino-acid possibilities. And what is true for proteins is all the more true for the higher systems that use proteins for functions like photosynthesis and vision, and still more true for whole organisms occupying that highest of levels where many functions coalesce into one purpose. Just as instructions and poems and love letters are completely absent from the mountains of QUERTY gibberish that can be accessed by blind searches, so it is with life. To do this activity we call living is so remarkable a feat that it can only be done by something extraordinarily well conceived and fashioned. Each and every new form of life must therefore be a masterful invention in its own right, embodying its own distintive version of functional coherence at the very highest level.